DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 4. Publishing DocBook Documents

Creating and validating XML documents is usually only half the battle. After you’ve composed your document, you’ll want to publish it. Publishing, for our purposes, means either print or web publishing. For XML documents, this is usually accomplished with some kind of stylesheet. In some environments, it is now possible to publish an XML document on the Web simply by putting it online with a stylesheet.

A Survey of Stylesheet Languages

Over the years, a number of attempts have been made to produce a standard stylesheet language and, failing that, a large number of proprietary languages have been developed. Since this book was first written, three standards have emerged as the clear frontrunners:

CSS

The W3C CSS Working Group created CSS as a style attachment language for HTML. It has also been advanced as a stylesheet language for XML. Some browsers will style arbitrary XML with CSS and some commercial products exist that will render XML+CSS either online or in print.

XSL

XSLT 1.0 is well established and is probably the most common styling technology for DocBook. XSLT 2.0 offers a number of important new features (at the expense of some complexity, naturally) and is growing in popularity.

It’s worth observing that there are two, related technologies in play here. XSLT 1.0 and 2.0, the transformation languages, and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). XSL-FO is an XML vocabulary for describing constraints on page layout.

XQuery

XQuery 1.0, developed in ...